Performance

The creation of this project was largely in two parts: the creation of the translations, and the creation of the interface and game that displayed them.

The translations, for the most part, were made before any of us had ever enrolled in this class. One of the members of the group had been putting songs through several layers of google translate for fun for the past couple years and displaying them online. Most of the songs were too obscure for this audience, though of those that were recognizable to the average American, Anaconda by Nicki Minaj and Low by Flo Rida were selected for the project since they were deemed the funniest. Closer by The Chainsmokers feat. Halsey was the only one made specifically for this project. Also made for this project (albeit not used since there were funnier options) were Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, Wildest Dreams by Taylor Swift, and Friday by Rebecca Black.

The translations were made by the following process: The songs were each translated in five batches that went through 10, 15, 26, 15, or 22 layers of languages before returning to english. Each layer of translations was made using Yandex Translator. The languages were divided into two groups. Primary languages are languages that Yandex has been translating for a long time, and are therefore translated more accurately, like Spanish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, etc. Secondary languages are the remainder which are either new to the site or in beta, like Hill Mari, Punjabi, and Tajik. These languages are more prone to dramatic errors that can spice up translations, but in excess lead to changes so drastic that it seems more confusing than funny, since nothing ties together the original and translation. In each batch, a list is made of all the primary language and three randomly selected secondary languages. From this list a random sequence of languages are chosen for translation, which are then manually translated through Yandex Translator. When the five batches are complete, then for each line of the original, the funniest translation from each batch is chosen to go into the master translation, which is the final product. The reason why there are five batches of different levels of translation is that often lines are changed minimally in translation or are translated so much that all that is left is one word or just a punctuation mark. Five batches stops most of these cases from going into the translation. Also, different lines need different amounts of translation, since if a line goes through too few translations, it isn't changed enough to be as funny as it could be, but if it goes through too many, it is shortened drastically. The differences in number of translations between batches ensures that different lines get something close to the necessary happy medium. After doing dozens of translations in the past, these numbers were found to be close to what an average good number of translations is for any given song.